Last weekend, Z24.nl and Belgium’s Data News, among others, reported that WhatsApp held rights to all photos and messages sent through its app. That startled me. I do not know its terms by heart. I knew they referred to possible use of profile pictures and statuses, but not that they supposedly covered all message content, including photos, or permitted media use.
Suddenly, I realised how often I accept terms without reading a word. I understand that free is never entirely free and that something is usually exchanged in return. Even so, this seemed to go very far. Other media reported that the terms concerned only status updates and profile pictures. Which account was right? I decided to read WhatsApp’s terms.
Investigating
At the time of writing in 2014, WhatsApp’s website said its privacy terms had last changed on 7 July 2012. That meant they had not changed after Facebook’s acquisition earlier that year. The terms did say, in essence, that an acquisition or merger could involve transferring user information and that WhatsApp might be unable to control what subsequently happened to it.
As I worked through the policy, it appeared that the source of the story, Germany’s Handelsblatt, had reached its conclusion too quickly. The relevant provisions concerned “status submissions”, including profile images, status text and last-seen information, rather than the content of messages.
What the terms allowed
So what did users agree to? These were the points that stood out in the legal information I reviewed in 2014:
- Users had to be at least sixteen and could not live in a country designated by the United States as supporting terrorism.
- WhatsApp accessed phone contacts to identify other users’ mobile numbers, but said it did not collect contacts’ names, email addresses or other details. It could also gather information such as billing details, where applicable, and cookies from visits to its website.
- WhatsApp could deny access to someone it considered annoying for any reason. Its wording even referred to people identified as annoying by authorised employees, agents, subagents, superagents or superheroes — yes, that was really in the text.
- Messages, location information, photos and documents were visible only to their intended recipients.
- WhatsApp said it did not retain messages. If a recipient was offline, a message was temporarily stored on its server until delivery, then deleted.
- WhatsApp said it did not sell personal information to third parties without consent, except as part of a specific programme for which users could opt in or out.
Finally, WhatsApp reserved the right to change its terms at any time. Something to keep in mind.
Inger
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